The recommendations of the Francis Inquiry cannot simply be implemented. It is a complicated set of proposals that will create new difficulties and challenges for the medical profession. Doctors need to lead the debate on what happens next. Robert Francis’s lawyerly circumlocution, filling almost 1,800 pages, guarantees that virtually nobody will read the whole report. […]
Nicola While on EU tobacco legislation and the EWTD
While the UK starts an introspective process of re-examing its relationship with the EU, and gears up for a referendum which may result in a complete withdrawal from the supranational body, in Brussels progress continues to be made on policies that promote and progress public health. Despite fears that the proposal for a revision of […]
Tessa Richards: Preventing disease with plastic water bottles and esprit de corps
A mosquito buzzed idly against the window inside the coach. Was it carrying the dengue virus we wondered? And if it was, what is the chance of dying from dengue haemorrhagic fever? Such questions run through your mind when you are in a country where the disease is endemic, and as the WHO has recently […]
Richard Smith: Should hubris be a disease?
Should hubris be a disease, asks my friend Faith. After a second I conclude, “Of course. It’s perhaps the most dangerous disease of all in that it destroys not just individuals, but potentially our whole species.” I think of hubris simply as men acting as gods (even though I don’t believe in gods). But Wikipedia […]
Vasiliy Vlassov: The destruction of medical education in Russia
While the words “healthcare reform” are forbidden in Russia, healthcare is changing quickly. Over the past three years, three federal laws have been rewritten: the basic healthcare law, a law on drugs, and a law on compulsory insurance. 2012 ended with a federal law on education coming in to force. This is a shot in […]
Penny Campling: What does apologising for a dysfunctional culture really mean?
The Francis Inquiry report rightly focuses on the need to transform the healthcare culture. It has made it clear that fault lines run throughout the NHS, from top to bottom, and that the inhumanity exposed at Mid Staffordshire is not restricted to that locality. The huge number of recommendations in the report (290) is presumably […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—11 February 2013
JAMA 6 Feb 2013 Vol 309 453 Stone the crows, a great little study from Oz that will change your practice at a stroke. They recruited 212 patients with intermittent claudication who had never had invasive treatment—which immediately made me realise the study couldn’t have been done in America, where at the first twinge of […]
Domhnall MacAuley: The surgeons who are not doctors
“The surgeons who are not doctors.” Reading this headline, I expected a story on training healthcare workers as surgical technicians in some under doctored developing country. But no, it was in the UK. I was intrigued. Medicine is introspective, protective, and doctor centric; self regulating and self directing. Places at medical school are highly prized, […]
Tiago Villanueva: Poverty and hunger in Portugal
Some time ago a patient told me that he needed to borrow money from a neighbour to buy a train ticket to come to his appointment at the practice. At the same time, this patient told me about the scarcity of food at home, and how it was a constant struggle to feed his daughter. […]
Birte Twisselmann: Let’s hear it for music and poetry
“Representation of older people in arts, music, and literature,” a seminar held at the Royal Society of Medicine, got off to a shaky start because of noisy building work next door. Eventually a new room was found and the afternoon got properly under way. Before the interruption, Estella Tincknell, associate professor for film and culture […]